Re: [RFC for-4.7] Switching to a single qemu tree each per qemu-xen and qemu-trad

[Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@citrix.com>]

On Thu, 2015-07-30 at 16:51 +0200, Vitaly Kuznetsov wrote:
> Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@citrix.com> writes:
> 
> > (CC-ing 2x QEMU maintainers and stable release manager)
> > 
> > The separate trees are a holdover from mercurial, which didn't (at the
> > time) have a good in-repo branching model.
> > 
> > I propose that Xen 4.6 should be the last release which uses these 
> > split
> > trees and that instead we combine them into just qemu-xen.git 
> > (upstream)
> > and qemu-xen-traditional.git (our old fork)
> 
> (sorry my question is a bit unrelated)
> 
> is there a proposed time frame for the retirement of
> qemu-xen-traditional? http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/QEMU_Upstream only
> mentions VGA passthrough as a missing feature but maybe it can be fixed
> for 4.7?

AIUI people (from Intel?) are working on that.

Due to Windows activation issues which are triggered by changing the h/w
platform (aka QEMU) under the guest we are taking a long tail approach here
and not actively looking to remove qemu-xen-traditional so that people with
VMs installed under old versions can choose the stick with that h/w
platform even on newer Xen.

Eventually, some long time down the line, we may decide that the chances
that anyone is still running such a VM is negligible and we can remove it.

In the meantime qemu-xen-traditional is essentially frozen, no new features
and only adjustments to e.g. keep up with changes to the control libraries
etc are made.

Ian.